Paper long abstract:

In Ireland, over a 60 year period, condoms changed from symbolic objects of deviance to medical devices. Until 1993, the sale and distribution of condoms were heavily regulated, being limited first to narrowly defined groups and conditions, and later to specific points of sale. In this paper, based on documentary analysis and qualitative interviews with activists involved in resisting the restriction to the sales and distribution of condoms up to 1993, we aim to explore this shift in Irish political and legal discourse, and the parallel transformation of condoms as social objects. In doing so, we bring together insights from STS - in particular ANT and materiality-oriented approaches - with critical approaches to law, in order to question the entanglement of law, social movements and technologies. We start by mapping the history of the prohibition and legalisation of condom sales in Ireland 1935-1993, and situating it in the context of broader governmental projects designed to control sexual expression and reproductive autonomy. We then turn to analysing the emergence of resistance to state regulation of condoms by various social networks, and explore how this history sheds light on the complex ways in which legal change relates to resistance, disobedience and social movements in the context of medical technologies. Throughout we explore how shifting socio-legal constructions of the condom, organised practices of daily resistance, and official articulations of the public good evolved around a 60 year period to move from prohibition to the settling of condoms as an essential technology of health.